1. Technical Field
The presently disclosed embodiments are directed to identifying substrate media distortions that can result from a printing process.
2. Brief Discussion of Related Art
For many printer products, especially production printers, it can be important to characterize paper distortion that occurs during Side 1 printing so that compensation can be applied to align the print on Side 1 with the print on Side 2 of the paper. The compensation can be applied by pre-distorting (e.g., magnifying) the digital images to be disposed on one or both of the sides of the paper prior to printing the digital images on Side 1 and/or Side 2 of the paper. Common distortions that occur to paper can include shrinkage due to fuser heating, and stretching due to some fuser designs.
The distortion of the paper can be different in different directions, and could be of different forms, such as, for example, uniform shrinkage/enlargement, non-uniform shrinkage/enlargement, spatially varying shrinkage/enlargement, and the like. Light weight paper (e.g., 70 gsm) can shrink as much as about 0.3%, or about 600-700 micrometers (μm) in some printing processes. Depending on the environment, the same type of paper can have different amounts of distortion due to paper moisture from ream to ream, day to day, or the settings of the printing device.
For tight registration requirements, the characterization can be performed for all papers used during the printing process, and may be necessary for new reams, for open reams, different environmental conditions, different print settings (e.g., high gloss via higher heat fusing), different print content (e.g., very high/low coverage, coatings, . . . ), and the like. Higher quality production printers tend to provide a process to characterize any paper and input the distortion information to a compensating process. Lower quality printers may have several distortion values stored for common papers and field updates may not be allowed.